Katrina Oral History
Stacy Parker Aab has three posts [1] [2] [3] at Huffington Post to describe her oral history project: The Katrina Experience (project home page). The blog entries have excerpts: A 30-year old guy at a shelter. A physician from a New Orleans hospital describing how things changed in an emergency and with no technology. A woman describing how the storm surge flooded the first floor of their home in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. A couple discussing having to gut and rebuild their flooded New Orleans home. A roofer describing what it was like in the Ninth Ward during the hurricane and aftermath.
My name is Stacy Parker Aab and I’m a writer here in Houston. For the past year I have interviewed Americans about their Katrina experiences.
We talk about the hurricane and the aftermath. We talk about what it’s been like to survive, and for some, to thrive. We talk about crimes. We talk about epiphanies. We talk about their lives before. We talk about their dreams ahead.
Katrina is not over. Far from it. Therefore, I will keep chronicling the lives of those who survived. I will also talk to people whose role, or calling, is to work with survivors.
Using the Studs Terkel approach, I’ve shaped those interviews into oral history essays. I’ve posted several essays on the project website: http://www.thekatrinaexperience.net.
Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in
• Oral history in the news
• Online Oral History Collections
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Audio in the museum setting
Brad Klein of Acoustiguide is the guest at Transom.org (a way to get new work into public radio). He discusses making audio tours for museums in a two-part series. In Part 2, he addresses using oral history recordings.
Using oral histories to complement museum exhibitions is a wonderful, and underutilized technique. It was used effectively in the Oakland Museum of California’s, “What’s Going On?—California and the Vietnam Era”, produced in 2004-2005. For that exhibition, Acoustiguide played a consulting role, advising the museum on technical and production considerations. Museum staff then spent a year or so collecting their own tape from Vietnam vets and others, documenting the profound effects of the war on the state of California.
One portion of the exhibition included the fuselage of a period airplane, and you could sit inside and listen to vets like Charles Benninghoff recall their trip home to the States. [Read More]
You have to go and listen to the two provided clips. They were evocative enough for me sitting at my computer, but to be at an exhibit and site in an airplane to hear this would have been amazing (in... Read More
Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in
• Afterwards
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Adventures in Family History Research
Found Memory Lane, a part of Sasha’s Roots (while egosearching, of course) I love the tagline: “A journal of my adventures in archiving and family history research - and the technology and resources I use to pursue it.”
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Loma Prieta Earthquake Oral History
UC Santa Cruz, near the epicenter of the 1989 Loma Prieta quake, announces publication of oral histories of the quake. Timely in light of the fact that I just read a book on California geology; the book concludes with a description of that quake. Here’s a link to the collection
From the introduction to the online transcripts:
On October 17, 1989 at 5:04 p.m. a 7.1 magnitude earthquake on the San Andreas Fault shook the Central Coast of California and lasted for fifteen seconds. The epicenter of the quake lay near Loma Prieta Peak in the Santa Cruz Mountains, about ten miles northeast of the city of Santa Cruz, deep in the redwoods of Forest of Nisene Marks State Park. The focus point was at a depth of ten miles. This earthquake killed sixty-three people and injured 3,757 others, and caused an estimated six billion dollars in property damage. It was the largest earthquake to occur on the San Andreas fault since the great San Francisco earthquake in April 1906.
While the national media covered the damage in the San Francisco Bay Area extensively, far less attention was paid to the effects of the earthquake in Santa Cruz County, where the... Read More
Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in
• Online Oral History Collections
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Record History, then Podcast (or videoblog) it
[updated] It’s a growing trend to plan to deliver projects as podcasts. From Florida to Scotland: Univeristy of West Florida will podcast history of Pensacola’s black community from interviews conducted with video. From Scotland comes news of a plan to record recollections of classmates of author Dame Muriel Spark, an alum of James Gillespie’s High School. (The school was the basis for Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.) They plan to make the histories available as podcasts.
I’m seeing a trend here in the news stories that show up about oral history projects. First the one from Edinburgh, and then the one from Florida. Both of these are projects in early stages—proposal and interviewing. I suspect that we’ll see more oral history projects that are conceived as having a “deliver it on the web” element to it. (I have a query in to someone associated with the Florida project about their delivery methods. Since it’s being recorded on video, will these be converted to audio for audio podcasts, or videoblogs? I don’t know, I hope to find out.)
More on Florida:
The project brings together Pensacola’s African-American Heritage Society and West Florida Historic Preservation Inc. with public history graduate students Christy Hurt and Valerie Hollinger and 20 students in associate professor Patrick Moore’s African-American Community History class.
They will interview nearly 100 people and document the changes to... Read More
Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in
• Afterwards
• Oral history in the news
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